The Man Within.

Graham Greene is one of my favorite novelists, period; I’ve read more novels of his than of any other author save P.G. Wodehouse and Agatha Christie. Greene wrote twenty-six novels, two of which he later repudiated and which have been out of print for over eighty years, and divided his works into serious novels and mere “entertainments,” the latter typically what we’d now call spy novels, although some of his entertainments, like my favorite work of his, Our Man in Havana, still had serious themes and the distinction seems arbitrary when one has the vantage point of reading his entire oeuvre. His first novel, The Man Within, foreshadows the potential dichotomy in his work, as a suspense novel with a tragic-romantic component, themes of Christian morality and guilt, and a central character grappling with fundamental questions of right and wrong.

Francis Andrews, the novel’s protagonist, is on the run as the novel begins, fleeing his former smuggling mates after betraying them to the authorities. After three days on the run without sleep, he stumbles into a hovel occupied by a young woman, Elizabeth, watching over the corpse of her just-dead guardian, an encounter that begins with her threatening Francis with a gun but improbably turns into a Victorian romance. Their entanglement comes apart when Elizabeth persuades Francis to follow through on his anonymous letter and go to Lewes to testify against the smugglers, who stand accused of killing an officer of the law when the authorities caught them on a local beach – but who remain so popular with the townsfolk that securing a conviction is very unlikely. Francis, who labels himself a coward throughout the book, in contrast to his fearless (and likely sociopathic) smuggler father, faces choice after choice to put what is right over his own skin, a path that endangers Elizabeth and himself before a strange ending allows Francis to make one last stab at finding some measure of courage.

The Man Within was published when Greene was 25, and it reads more like an homage to British literature of the 19th century than a novel of its time; it came four years after The Great Gatsby appeared, three years after The Sun Also Rises, and seven years after Joyce ushered in postmodernism with Ulysses, all of which makes Greene’s first stab at a novel seem quaint in comparison. His second novel, Orient Express (also published as Stamboul Train), was a pure “entertainment,” a thriller set on the train that Christie made famous two years later. While that novel had elements of romance between the characters, those threads were more cynical in nature, dispensing with the naïve take on love Greene displayed in The Man Within, which has Greene’s voice in evidence but without the life experience he might have needed to craft his later works, both the serious “Catholic novels” and the thrillers that made his reputation. The most interesting character in this book gets relatively little screen time or development – Carlyon, Francis’ patron on the smuggling ship, a friend who filled in as a father figure, and who was most directly hurt by Francis’ ultimate betrayal and who is hunting Francis with the intention to kill him. That relationship, prior to the anonymous letter, isn’t well fleshed-out, and Carlyon is drawn too thinly for a character that would have to be complex to generate the remorse he does in Andrews.

Greene himself later derided this book as “hopelessly romantic,” but at least allowed this one to remain in print whereas the next two novels he wrote were, in his view, so bad that he renounced them and let them fall out of print. The Man Within stands more as a work of historical interest, as it shows Greene the storyteller learning his craft in a work that would probably rank as very good had it come from most novelists but, from one of the masters of 20th century literature, feels immature and a bit hollow.

Next up: I’ve finished Robert Heinlein’s Starship Troopers and started William Faulnker’s Pulitzer Prize- and National Book Award-winning novel A Fable.